31 August 2010

For 35 years, exorcism movies didn’t change. William Peter Blatty’s 1971 novel, The Exorcist, and William Friedkin’s film adaptation two years later, established the subgenre's signature motifs. As Benjamin Strong notes in his L Magazine review of The Last Exorcism, there are “celibate priests…Catholics, absentee parents, and distracting subplots set in Africa and the Middle East.”

Slasher-movie victims deal with symbolic manifestations of evil; John Carpenter’s white-masked killer is called “The Boogeyman” as often as "Michael Myers". But the victims in exorcism movies battle literal soldiers of Satan, hell-demons who punish PYTs for their spiritual purity. You could read them as metaphors if you tried hard enough—is the demon’s name “Puberticus”?—but neither The Exorcist nor its sequel encourages you to do so. John Boorman’s follow-up, in fact, is explicit in its insistence that Ancient, Unadulterated Evil is real, whether modern peoples believe in it or not.

Director Alexander Aja seems a lot harder on his characters than he is on himself. Piranha 3D, a bloodbath spectacular set during spring break debauchery—Hip Shakin’ Mamas in 3D might be more like it, as it boasts more T&A than any studio movie since the 1970s—is not for want of leering objectifiers. Chief among them, however, is the camera itself.

A monster movie should be fun. But for a long time, this one is never more fun than another fast-motion montage of topless women gyrating to generic hip-hop. Bonered boys cheer-on motorboating lesbians; a girl-on-girl underwater ballet/make-out session is scored outrageously to Delibes. “It’s like fish with boobies,” one onlooker remarks. “If fish looked like that,” his friend answers, “I’d only fuck fish.” That friend is Jerry O’Connell, putting his naturally unappealing unctuousness to good use as a Joe Francis stand-in, godfather here of the “Wild Wild Girls” series. Early on, Aja seems to enjoy this depravity as much as the titty-loving villain. But, apparently, he’s only setting up such degeneracy so he can smack it down. This being a horror movie, a man as lecherous as O’Connell can’t escape punishment, and Piranha 3D finally metes it out with glee.

27 August 2010

In his non-Batman films, Christopher Nolan works off of gimmicks. For Inception, which feels like a multiplexed Last Year at Marienbad, he takes The Heist Movie and flips it around: Leonardo DiCaprio, doing One Last Job Before He’s Out Of The Game For Good, is assembling a crack team not for stealing but to do the opposite—for planting. It’s a series of clichés, twisted just enough to make them seem like they’re not. It’s familiar but original, the same but new, which is exactly what Americans want. That’s how you make $150 million in one summer month.

Leo and his gang (including, hooray, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and, blech, Ellen Page) use unspecified technology to invade dreams, usually to swipe something from their targets’ subconscious. But a new client (Ken Wanatabe) wants them to do what’s never been done (or has it?)—lodge an idea in a mark’s mind and make him (Cillian Murphy) think it’s his own. Nolan’s twisted sci-fi plotting is so Original, in fact, that the script requires page after page of clunky exposition to set it up—mostly in form of Page, as The New Girl, asking DiCaprio, The Old Hand, lots of questions. (Hopefully, if Nolan has done it right, the same ones about which the audience is wondering.) One she doesn’t think to ask: why are these dreams so un-dreamlike?

I mean, sure, the opening sequence abandons spatial logic, much as our brains do during REM sleep: a conversation begins in a room, and continues on the roof without missing a beat. (This is the most Marienbad-y scene, though Nolan swears that he only saw that classic recently, and had simply absorbed its style from the many films he has seen that Renais’ influenced.) Despite this bit of illogic, there’s still a bit too much sense to the movie’s dreams, too much psychology manifest in literal terms. Like, when Page explores DiCaprio’s mind, it’s a “building,” with multiple “levels,” accessible by elevator. The most secret part is, literally, the basement. What’s there has been “buried”—get it?

How could you not? The basement is where DiCaprio hides his deepest, darkest secret: the truth about what happened to his dead wife (Marion Cotillard). Yes, once again, DiCaprio is coming to grips, in flashbacky dreams, with the fate that befell his beloved bride, as he did only a few months ago in Shutter Island. Meanwhile, Nolan, once again, is dealing with the fallibility of memory and with a man consumed with guilt over the accidental death of his wife. Curiously, however, this Nolan protagonist directs his vengeful rage inward, rather than out, unlike those who have preceded him, from Batman to Guy Pearce in Memento and Al Pacino in Insomnia. (Though you could argue that because Inception expands the deeper it burrows, inward is the new outward!)

Nolan here is obviously obsessed with movies—his own, those of his star, and those from throughout film history: from French New Wave to Nicholas Roeg’s Don’t Look Back, from the Bond series to Royal Wedding. Inception, in fact, is not a movie about dreams—if it were, it’d be as unbearably dumb as some have claimed it is. Rather, it’s a movie about movies. (Still, relatively dumb.) After all, the oldest cliché about the movies is that they’re like a dream—you know, experienced by immobile subjects in the dark, vicariously participating in a story. But, as he does with clichés, Nolan spins this platitude until he invests it with new meaning. And it’s here that Inception gets interesting, maybe even a little fun.

Nolan’s detectives don’t move between levels of consciousness—they move between different genres. Or, different settings, anyway. What’s frustrating about Nolan’s moviescape is how every level tends toward a different variation on the effects-heavy action spectacle, without leaving much space for credible human drama. What’s pleasurable about it, though, is how he’s able to tie the narrative in epistemological knots—what’s real? what’s a dream?—by capitalizing on how dreams and movies overlap. Inception’s real gimmick is its unanswerable twist: is the entire movie “really” happening? Or is all of it part of a dream? (Dreaming also nicely justifies the implausibilities of the genre conventions on display: the way endless goons are available to give chase; the way that bullets never hit the hero.) At the very end, Michael Caine picks DiCaprio up from the airport; a moment later, they’re in DiCaprio’s house. Were they able to move so quickly because it’s a dream? Or, because of course Nolan wouldn’t show every second of a car ride between the airport and home—because that’s what cuts are for? Inception understands, and exploits for cheeky confounding, that the grammar of movies and the grammar of dreaming are the same. It's not just that movies are like dreams, but that dreams are like movies. Grade: B+

When Vengeance (Fuk Sau) opens, a mommy and a daddy are gunned down in their home while their kids watch from a secret hiding place. Then, from her hospital room, a bed-ridden survivor begs, “Avenge me!” Johnnie To’s latest jumps off from an origin-story so familiar—from Kill Bill, from Lost—it’s archetypal. But what sets it apart, like everything else in To’s often generic oeuvre, are the details. Such as, while the villains and the victims are predominantly Chinese, that sole survivor? Why, it’s Sylvie Testud! (In what disappointingly amounts to a cameo.) That black-clad archangel who promises her satisfaction? Johnny Fucking Hallyday, known 50 years ago as The French Elvis but now looking much more Expendable.

25 August 2010

Make-Out with Violence is a movie about summer love and zombies, but it resists being categorized easily as a movie about either—for reasons good and bad. It boils down, maybe, to a cleverly conceived but dragged-out allegory of a teenager who won't let go of a puppy crush, basically asking, how would James Hurley have dealt with that whole Laura Palmer thing if she'd risen from the grave? When high-school senior Wendy (Shellie Marie Shartzer) goes missing and presumed dead, it's hard for everyone in her small town to deal: her boyfriend, her best friend, her general acquaintances. But it's hardest—as he frequently reminds the other characters—for Patrick (Eric Lehning), who nursed for her the kind of silent but soul-consuming crush common to adolescence. His pain eases some when his brothers find Wendy's bruised and bluish body, impossibly reanimated and tied up by the river, and hide it in a friend's bathroom. There, Patrick can tend to her like a houseplant—one that's more Audrey II than azalea—giving him an outlet for the feelings that outlived their original object.

18 August 2010

Does Altiplano need to exist? According to itself, absolutely! But I'm not so sure. This politics-abandoning meditation on love, loss and transcultural commonality is self-validating, a movie in which a war photographer renounces her profession only to relearn, by the end, the necessary and cathartic power of images: how they put the protest in protest-suicide, the meaning into death. "Without an image," one character says, "there is no story." In the movies, that's true literally: Jasmin Tabatabai plays the shutterbug; Olivier Gourmet is her husband, an ophthalmologist relocated to a remote Andean village where mercury runoff from a gringo mine is blinding the indigenes. Ostensibly, this is some politically conscious dusty-realism, but Brosens & Woodworth approach it lyrically, exchanging the hardscrabble for something more numinous: this is ultimately not a polemic, but a spiritual about the transcontinental connection of souls.

13 August 2010

Talk about bromances: The Expendables is the faggiest movie of the year, so straight it’s totally homo—like, when Stallone is telling [Jason] Statham that, like, yeah, you can have sex with a woman…but then what? Talk to them? About shoes or rainbows or some shit? Best to stay with your bros, bro. [My colleague] wanted to see Eat Pray Love for this week, so we could compare this testosterone fest to that presumable estrogen party. But I think that would have been unnecessary: the perfect counterpoint to this movie was last week’s The Other Guys, which sent up all the chest-puffing clichés in which this movie revels with a satisfied smirk.

11 August 2010

If you loved The Descent, you’ll...well, that won’t have much bearing on how you’ll feel about Centurion, though both films were directed by the same man. The former was an unbearably claustrophobic horror movie about spelunking and evolutionary deformities; the latter is a swords and sandals epic whose kitschy, postapocalyptic, Mad Max aesthetic would seem to have more in common with Descent-follow-up Doomsday. But Centurion’s most notable feature isn’t its strange make-up—it’s its ultraviolence.

Set in 117 CE England, like a Valhalla Rising prequel, Centurion centers on a gang of ancient Romans (led by Michael Fassbender), a magnificent seven of whom are stranded behind enemy lines after their invading battalion is slaughtered by heathens. As they make their way to friendly terrain, through misty Arthurian forests or across breathtaking vistas, they encounter scenes of startling gore: a midnight urinator takes a sword between the legs; flaming arrows pierce skulls; heads tossed against trees splatter like watermelons. One battle sequence looks like some goremeister’s greatest hits-reel of slit-throats and beheaded heads. And the graphic violence isn’t reserved for battle: our starving wandering-heroes cut open an elk to drink its warm blood and eat the half-digested moss in its stomach.

The point, admirably, is to deromanticize the violence of war: to expose ostensibly valorous sword swipes (say, of a slick flick like Gladiator) for what they really are: acts of horrifying murder, moral or not. Marshall has reached so far in the past he comes out in the present: his heathens are villains, but his Roman “heroes”—proto-Westerners who can’t defeat the local population of the land they invaded—emerge as villainous, too, a bunch of rapists and child killers. There are no “good” sides, only a handful of decent individuals misguidedly fighting for bad leaders, alongside bad men. Centurion isn’t anti-troop. But it’s rabidly anti-war, and anti-authority, too. Grade: B-

06 August 2010

...Just two weeks ago, I was all like, “damn Hollywood be hating on some NYPD," and that reaches its apex here in The Other Guys. Seriously, have you ever seen a mainstream comedy that so relentlessly mocks the machismo ethos that pervades police precincts across the boroughs? I’ve never seen a movie that hated cops so much, painted them with such broad strokes as Yankee-loving, trigger-happy, Prius-hating ex-pimps: guys who can’t tell a ballet studio from a strip club, guys who cause millions of dollars in property damage and put untold lives at risk in order to nab suspects on a misdemeanor marijuana charge. (You know, such a realistic portrayal.)

The only thing The Other Guys seems to hate more than cops is bankers: this movie’s also the hitherto apotheosis of the economic anxiety that’s been creeping into the blockbusters lately...

Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon has recently inspired a pair of gimmicky, not entirely successful anti-war films. In 2007, Ari Folman combined animation and documentary in Waltz with Bashir to grapple with not only his memories of the war but with memory itself—and it was a lot more interesting to think about than to watch. Two years later, in Lebanon, Samuel Moaz has set an entire movie inside a tank—at least, that may have been the misleading description of this movie you've read before. In fact, almost half of this nevertheless-claustrophobic war movie takes place outside of the tank, in battle scenes visible to the audience and the main characters through a periscope: essentially, war footage printed with convex edges and a crosshairs over the middle. Because the periscope can "cut," sort of, between close-ups and long shots, it offers a unique perspective for viewers both diegetic and non—one with vaguely metacinematic overtones.

03 August 2010

Schmucks is meant to be a comic fantasy to mollify the schmucks in the audience, still apprehensive about their long-term unemployment. Did you notice that Sullivan’s Travels was playing at the rep house in the background of Rudd and Carell’s meet cute? People who have jobs, like the double-underlined-bad [guy], are all really mean. And bad. (They close factories! They don’t care about radioactive waste!) And so it’s quitting his job at the end that makes Rudd able, finally, to be the person that his girlfriend knows (and not the one she doesn’t know)—the one that she loves. Once she loses her job, too, in that final scene, you know they’ll finally be able to be happy together. Being unemployed is actually really great! It frees you up to be your naturally happy self.

You see this kind of thinking in movies, and the popular culture in general, all the time: that it’s actually really hard to be rich. You know, because mo’ money mo’ problems? But that’s just a bullshit line billionaire studio heads feed the poor so they (we?) won’t feel so bad about their inability to buy groceries. It’s tough to be rich? Meh, I’ll take my chances, thanks.